Ross Burbidge

by Dr. Iain Corness

Ross Burbidge is a man who demonstrates that it is never too late to learn new skills in life, and the key to new adventures is provided by languages. He is also a man who has managed to combine a lifetime of love of motor sport, with his many and varied occupations.
Ross was born in Australia and was raised in Brisbane, Queensland. His father was a civil engineer and Ross showed an interest in that field. “I had pretensions to be an engineer, but academically I didn’t make it,” he said. In actual fact, the real reasons included a lack of stimulus from his schooling and a personal uncertainty of future direction. “Basically I didn’t know what I wanted to be – but motor sport had started to rule my life.” While in this state of vacillation he went to the Queensland University of Technology and studied accounting and commerce.
Because of the motor sport ambition, he worked in a garage at weekends, as many young men did to get a little extra money, but Ross had other ideas. He wanted to go motor racing and with a loan from his parents, bought a car to “drive to university”. This was secretly modified for racing, with the hot bits hidden in the garage, to be added to the car come race weekends!
After leaving university he took a series of jobs, always involved with the motor industry in one way or another, such spare parts sales or trainee manager, but nothing with a future, because at that stage, for a dyed in the wool motor racer, the future extended only as far as the next race meeting.
He was by then running his own car, and began to attract some sponsorship and was able to run in Australia’s premier sedan race, the Bathurst 1000, and scored a second in class against the factory teams. Motor sport then became even more dominant, and so he opened his own workshop, ostensibly to reach out to the public wanting go-faster equipment, but in actual fact, to give him a workshop in which he could prepare his own car! Eventually, even Ross could see that this business was going nowhere, so he closed it and moved to Melbourne.
Again he was involved in motor sport, but remained on the fringe, because he had this idea that he should learn Japanese. He had been running Japanese race cars, and needed to import parts from Japan, so it seemed to make sense at that time. It was at that precise moment that serendipity changed his life. He read an advertisement placed by a Japanese company wishing to start a motor sports company in Melbourne. This was called Scuderia Motorsports and they were looking for mechanics and a manager. He applied for a mechanics position, but when they found that he could speak some Japanese, he was offered the position as manager.
The Japanese influence became stronger. They took him to Japan to race at the famous Mt. Fuji circuit, while the owner of the company would frequently make the trip to Melbourne, mainly because he liked coming to play golf. Ross’s ability with the Japanese language was becoming stronger, now taking formal lessons, and so were his connections with Japan.
It was time for him to really cement the relationship and he moved to Queensland’s Gold Coast, the most popular holiday region for the Japanese honeymooners. He decided to retire from motor sport, and hung up his helmet. That side of his life was over. On the Gold Coast, he joined a Japanese tour company and became a tour coordinator for them, to oversee their 35 tour guides. His Japanese language abilities continued to improve, but as we all know, when you live in an English speaking society, it is always difficult to become really fluent in a foreign language.
Again it was serendipity that changed his life – his old language teacher in Melbourne contacted him to advise of an opportunity on the island of Hokkaido. This was to work in a little village as a ‘Coordinator for International Relations’. Ross was told that immersion in the language would be the best way to become properly fluent, and this village did not speak English. He took the position without really knowing what was expected of him, and described the post as “Just teaching a little bit of English and walking around the village so that people could stare at me!”
But there was more to it than that. Motor sport had not finished with him yet, or he with it. As his plane came in to land at the small village’s airstrip he noticed a development that looked very much like a race circuit. It was, and when the developers found about the new coordinator’s race background he was asked to become involved, even if just to translate signs into English, and translate the official documents from the world motor sport governing authority in Europe.
From there, it was a natural extension to be running his own team again, and then assisting the local rally promoters who had the ambition of hosting Japan’s first world rally championship round. With Ross’s assistance, this became reality in 2004.
However, he was tiring of Japan, and had experienced Thailand on holidays, so became involved with the Rally of Thailand that year, and then decided to see if he could boost rallying in SE Asia.
As part of that dream, he has imported two rally cars to Thailand from Japan, and is looking for suitably sponsored young Thai drivers to promote. “Pattaya makes sense,” said Ross, “the majority of rallies are around this area, and I like the relaxed living here, after the straight-jacket society of Japan.”
So if you see a red Honda Integra rally car around our streets, you can say “Konichiwa” or even “G’Day”. Ross the motor racing linguist is amongst us, and if you have enough money and talent, you might even score that drive.